“Reflections on Wallace Stevens”, p. 134; conclusion
Poetry and the Age (1953)
Context: How necessary it is to think of the poet as somebody who has prepared himself to be visited by a dæmon, as a sort of accident-prone worker to whom poems happen — for otherwise we expect him to go on writing good poems, better poems, and this is the one thing you cannot expect even of good poets, much less of anybody else. Good painters in their sixties may produce good pictures as regularly as an orchard produces apples; but Planck is a great scientist because he made one discovery as a young man — and I can remember reading in a mathematician’s memoirs a sentence composedly recognizing the fact that, since the writer was now past forty, he was unlikely ever again to do any important creative work in mathematics. A man who is a good poet at forty may turn out to be a good poet at sixty; but he is more likely to have stopped writing poems, to be doing exercises in his own manner, or to have reverted to whatever commonplaces were popular when he was young. A good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times; a dozen or two dozen times and he is great.
“Let's just say that if complete and utter chaos were lightning, then he'd be the sort to stand on a hilltop in a thunderstorm wearing wet copper armor and shouting 'All Gods are bastards.”
Variant: If complete and utter chaos was lightning, then he'd be the sort to stand on a hilltop in a thunderstorm wearing wet copper armour and shouting 'All gods are bastards!
Source: The Color of Magic
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Terry Pratchett 796
English author 1948–2015Related quotes
Tears streamed down my dad’s face. “I was about nine or ten, the same ag
Burro Genius: A Memoir (2004)
“A tree doesn't make a thunderstorm, but any fool knows where lightning's going to strike.”
Source: The Wise Man's Fear
The Guardian - The best God joke ever - and it's mine! (September 1980)
“We are grown-up infants, and God is a sort of 'wet nurse' to humanity.”
Eminent Indians (1947)
"Hymn in the Vale of Chamouni" (1802)
“His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning.”
A reference to George Meredith's style.
The Decay of Lying (1889)
Sivakozhundu of Tiruvazhundur (1939)
Context: Listen, You can hear the thunder. Ten cracks in the last five minutes. The thunderstorm is a constant phenomenon, raging alternately over some part of the world or the other. Can a single man or creature escape death if all that charge of lightning strikes the earth? No. And therefore it is natural for thunder to crash, and only in the skies. But once in a long while lightning does strike the earth. Then, instead of killing its victim outright, it snatches his eyes away. Swami, would you say this is a natural phenomenon, or that it is against nature?